‘Cristina’ Canceled After 11-Week Run : Television: Columbia and CBS cite disappointing ratings, but the talk-show host says viewership was on the rise and cites profit participation problems.

Columbia Pictures Television and CBS Television Stations pulled the plug on the 11-week-old talk show “Cristina” because of disappointing ratings and poor expectations for wider distribution, executives for the companies said Friday.

But Cristina Saralegui, host of the program that airs here on KCBS-TV Channel 2 weekdays at 9 a.m., countered that ratings were on the rise and that the limited-market “experiment” was killed because CBS refused to give her profit participation in the show.

In a phone interview from her Miami office, Saralegui--a Cuban-American who also hosts a successful Spanish-language talk show that airs on nearly 600 U.S. broadcast and cable companies and in 15 countries--added that she is negotiating with new financial backers and expects to be back on the air with her English talk show soon.

“The deal broke down over business, over compensation,” said Saralegui, who was the first Spanish-language talk-show host to cross over to mainstream television. “At the beginning, CBS was talking about profit participation but in the end they just wanted us to be employees. I’m not going to do that. I know how big this can get.”

Saralegui originally had been signed to produce the show for a three-month trial run that aired in 20 markets with heavy concentrations of Latinos. Toward the end of the run, according to KCBS General Manager Steven Gigliotti, the CBS stations group and Columbia decided that the show had not performed well enough to justify a full-scale national rollout.

A spokesman for Columbia explained that “the program is creatively sound and we’ve had some success in some markets, but not as many success stories as we would have liked.”

Gigliotti acknowledged that the CBS station group attempted to continue the test run without Columbia’s backing in hopes that it would catch on enough to justify expansion to many more markets somewhere down the road.

In order to do that, he said, the deal “had to be done on a very tight financial plan, and that plan just was not acceptable to all parties.”

Gigliotti expressed disappointment that the program did not succeed, but said that he did not view this as a setback for Latino-flavored programming on mainstream television. He said that next year KCBS is planning to produce a monthly program aimed at the local Latino community, and if “Cristina” is revived, he would consider buying it. Gigliotti said that in reruns the past three weeks, the audience for “Cristina” had started to grow.

Saralegui said that ratings in many markets were showing that same sort of growth, proving to her that the audience was just now becoming aware of the program.

She said she was disappointed, but not discouraged.

“Like Winston Churchill said, ‘Never give up,’ and I won’t give up,” Saralegui vowed. “It’s a miracle that we even got on the air and I’m very pleased with the ratings and the response. There are a lot of other people interested in going ahead with it, and as far as I’m concerned, this is just a short commercial break.”

KCBS will continue to air reruns of “Cristina” until it decides what to put in its place, Gigliotti said.